What a fucking doofus:
The author turned Ohio Senate candidate JD Vance has blamed America’s woes on “the childless left”, singling out Vice-President Kamala Harris, transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, Senator Cory Booker and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for their own share of the blame.
Speaking to a conservative thinktank, the Republican also praised the far-right president of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, for encouraging married couples to have children.
Vance is a venture capitalist and former US marine who wrote the bestseller Hillbilly Elegy about his upbringing in Appalachia and experience studying law at Yale.
Running for a Senate seat which will be vacated next year by Rob Portman, a relative centrist in a party dominated by Donald Trump, Vance has attracted backing from the tech billionaire Peter Thiel. He has also apologised for tweets criticising Trump, for whom he has said he did not vote in 2016.
On Friday night, Vance spoke to a conference organised by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.
The “childless left”, he said, have no “physical commitment to the future of this country” yet offer an “elite model” for the American business and political class.
Mentioning the four prominent Democrats, he asked: “Why is this just a normal fact of … life for the leaders of our country to be people who don’t have a personal and direct stake in it via their own offspring?”
Harris has two stepchildren with her husband, first gentleman Doug Emhoff, who are known to call her “Momala”. Buttigieg has no children with his husband, Chasten Buttigieg. Booker and Ocasio-Cortez are in relationships but are not married and do not have children.
Cue Chasten Buttigieg:
“Bringing a child into this world can be a long, difficult, and often heartbreaking process for any family. Shame on [Vance] for this tactless take. As a father, he should know better. As a wannabe Senator, it's clear that empathy isn't his strong suit,” Chasten wrote.
He added that not having kids “doesn’t make you any less American.”
In a recent Washington Post profile, Chasten revealed he and his husband have been trying to adopt for over a year.
“It’s a really weird cycle of anger and frustration and hope,” Chasten told the Post. “You think it’s finally happening and you get so excited, and then it’s gone.”
By the way, The Washington Post completely debunked Vance’s stupid argument:
So, by looking at the data from 2016 and 2018 (the most recent surveys for which data are readily available), we can see that conservatives are more likely to have children than liberals — and are also more likely to have more children. About 80 percent of conservatives have children, compared to 62 percent of liberals. And 65 percent of conservatives have two or more kids, compared to about half of liberals.
But “having children” is different from what Vance is talking about, which is having kids at home. There, the divide is less stark. About 23 percent of conservatives have children under the age of 18 at home, compared to 21 percent of liberals. About 1 in 10 liberals have more than one child at home; for conservatives, the figure is 1 in 8.
The divide between how many children conservatives have and how many they have at home is in part a function of conservatives tending to be older — and therefore having more grown children. But among those under age 50, the ideological divide emerges again, with conservatives being more likely to have children than liberals. However, liberals are more likely to be under age 50 than are conservatives, with a majority of conservatives being over that age and 6 in 10 liberals being 50 or younger.
Nonetheless, parents in the United States are more likely to be conservative than liberal, both overall and of children under the age of 18. American parents of children under 6 are also more likely to be conservative than liberal.
But parents with children at home are more likely to be moderate than anything.
And that complicates Vance’s political cleverness. If we break out parentage by party, the distributions shift. Democrats and independents who lean Democratic make up 45 percent of parents in the United States; Republicans and Republican-leaning independents make up only 37 percent. Among those who have kids under 18 at home, 47 percent are Democrats or Democratic leaners and only 32 percent are Republican or Republican leaners.
J.D. Vance, author of The Hillbilly Elegy and current aspirant to the Republican senatorial nomination in Ohio, wasn’t able to make any of the reasonable objections to Krugman. Instead Vance resurrected an archaic insult by suggesting Krugman was a weird cat lady:
Some people on Twitter, including the Washington Monthly‘s Timothy Noah, were puzzled by the “weird cat ladies” jibe. In context, Vance is clearly alluding to Krugman being childless (which, as I understand, is true enough, as is Krugman’s cat ownership). From that small foothold on reality, Vance jumps, in a real logical leap, to the idea that Krugman is a partisan of the childlessness.
“Crazy Cat Ladies” is a phrase that pops up in venues like The American Conservative as short-hand for, roughly, “modern career-oriented women who are so bewitched by feminism that they’ll never marry and have kids but instead doomed to be lifelong pet owners.” (There is also an echo in Vance’s tweet of the long-standing homophobic slander against John Maynard Keynes suggesting that the fact the great economist was gay and childless meant he had no concern for posterity.)
The jibe is rooted in centuries-old shaming of childless women. The affinity of spinsters with cats was a stereotype already in the Middle Ages. In 1880, the Dundee Courier argued, “There is nothing at all surprising in the old maid choosing a cat as a household pet or companion. Solitude is not congenial to human nature, and a poor forlorn female, shut up in a cheerless ‘garret,’ brooding all alone over her blighted hopes, would naturally centre her affections on some of the lower animals.”
Vance is doing this because he's running well behind Mandel, whose platform can basically be summed up as "Gilead was actually a utopia." That sounds hyperbolic, but no, for real, he's been arguing that we "need a Judeo-Christian revolution in this country" and that a belief in God should be enforced "in the classroom, in the workplace, and throughout society." Mandel's got a leg up, however, because he comes across as more sincere in his fanaticism.
But even though Vance's strategy won't work for him, it still injects real poison into the political bloodstream.
Fox News picked up on Vance's idea and had a segment where they pretended to "debate" this notion, but really, the point was to gin up jealousy in their audience of supposedly hedonistic childless liberals who are living it up while you, Fox News viewer, had the hard life of diapers and paying for band camp. It was more grist for the spite mill that has become the whole of right-wing politics these days.
Vance, of course, is just part of the larger Republican troll-industrial complex, in which Republicans attract attention and money from the base by competing to see who can be the worst. Recent examples include Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas (and, of course, Trump himself) whining that Cleveland's baseball team dropped a racist mascot, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis selling anti-vaccination gear at his campaign website, and Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene calling Air Force veteran Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., a "traitor" because of his outspoken opposition to the fascist insurrection on January 6.
These kinds of tactics work to get support from the GOP base. DeSantis has become a favorite for Trump's running mate if/when he runs for president again in 2024. Cruz is both one of the most hated men in D.C. and one of the strongest fundraisers, filling his coffers with eff-the-liberals dollars. And Taylor Greene, whose bug-eyed ravings regularly attract liberal dunks and outrage, is one of the biggest fundraisers in the House.
And a huge fraud:
In advance of announcing his run for Senate, Hillbilly Elegy author turned venture capitalist J.D. Vance deleted dozens of old tweets blasting former President Donald Trump. But Vance, who is warring with fellow Ohio Republicans for the MAGA vote, forgot to scrub one Twitter element of his anti-Trump past: his “likes.”
Vance’s Twitter likes, which were still visible as of Monday afternoon, include two tweets supporting Hillary Clinton’s 2016 candidacy, a post implying Trump supporters are antisemitic, and multiple tweets indicting Trump’s character. One tweet even accuses then-candidate Trump of sexual assault, and another calls him “psychologically disturbed.” He also liked two tweets mocking Melania Trump.
Most of the controversial Twitter likes came around the time of the leaked “Access Hollywood” tape in early October 2016, where Trump was caught on microphone saying he could grab women by their genitals with impunity because, “When you’re a star, they let you do it.”
And U.S. Senate candidate, Rep. Tim Ryan (D. OH-13), is wasting no time slamming Vance over his stupid remarks. Received this e-mail today from Ryan’s U.S. Senate campaign:
Tim’s Republican opponent J.D. Vance just proposed a ridiculous new idea to violate the voting rights of millions of Americans.
It’s not just J.D.’s bizarre new scheme -- the GOP is desperately trying to attack our right to vote. Will you chip in $5 to help Tim Ryan flip Ohio’s open Senate seat and protect our voting rights from GOP schemes? We’re behind on our July goal and need to catch up!
If J.D. Vance is banking on the “parent vote,” we have some bad news for him: working families are tired of the GOP’s BS and broken promises.
Mitch McConnell and his Senate Republicans have opposed every piece of legislation meant to help hard-working parents. If the GOP cares so much about families, why did every single Republican vote against expanding the Child Tax Credit and sending families $300 a month per child?
Republicans in the Senate are giving the American people nothing but obstruction. We need to expand our razor-thin Democratic Senate majority, invest in our workers and their families, and secure voting rights for all Americans.
It all depends on having the resources to flip Ohio’s open Senate seat blue. We need to raise another $22,000 by the end of the month -- can we count on you to chip in?
-- Team Ryan
Click here to donate to Ryan’s campaign.